As we know, web app development is a complex process that, on the one hand, consists of laborious work at the backend and, on the other hand, includes plenty of efforts while creating a nice-looking and responsive UI.

If you want to optimize the construction of your web applications, you need to find the best option for organizing your work with data as well as a fast and powerful js library for drawing app interface.

This variant can be implemented by using OData, an open data protocol for building RESTful API’s, and by adapting Webix UI library to its rules of requesting and modifying data.

OData’s goal is to enable a broad access to data regardless of the way it is stored. It allows requesting and updating resources via HTTP commands and provides an entire query language directly in the URL.

Well, if you are reading this post, you probably know a lot about Webix. If suddenly no, you can find more info here. All in all, I can say that our users find it fast and easy.

Right after the release of Webix 2.5 we’ve updated our online developer tool Webix Skin Builder. Since this upgrade, it has an built-in Material skin and small UX enhancements.

For those who haven’t used Skin Builder yet, we’ll explain the practical use of this handy designer tool. It allows creating custom skins for the UI of your web apps as well as provides you with the existing set of skins.

Material Skin

When we’ve firstly announced the possibility to apply the Material skin to your web app built with Webix, the skin wasn’t included into the library package. To download it you had to go to the special github.com repository and take the skin there. Now this skin is available right from our Skin Builder tool.

Webix Skin Builder will also delight you with an improved UI. Just check it to be sure that it works and looks better.

We are glad to announce our small but effective and long-expected Webix update 2.5! First of all, we can boast of Microsoft Edge support. Despite this new browser for Windows 10 hasn’t been released yet, Webix widgets already support it. Secondly, we’ve improved our complex widgets such as Pivot and Kanban as well as added an opportunity to block time in Calendar widget. And the final traditional update is bugs fixing.

If you are too busy to read the whole post, you can download a new library version here.

Microsoft Edge ready

Since the version 2.5, Webix supports Microsoft Edge, which is a default browser for upcoming Windows 10. Microsoft has announced that it would have plenty of JS improvements over IE11 and similar performance to Chrome and Firefox browsers.

Webix is MS edge ready, which means that your web apps will run flawlessly across a new cutting edge browser as soon as it is officially released (on July, 29).

We love open source and are willing to make this part of Webix community bigger and happier. Starting from Webix 2.4, in addition to the ability to use Webix in GPL projects, we add a FLOSS Exception to the existing GPL License. Thanks to this update, you can use Webix in your applications distributed under MIT, BSD and other open source licenses!

Thus, you can use Webix in open source projects that exists under a license that is a part of the FLOSS Exception List without taking into consideration the GPLv3 restrictions. The only requirement implies that your open source project should be intended for using by end-users but not for creating a library for software development purposes.

FLOSS License List

We have some great news for you! Webix was updated to the version 2.4 which includes such great enhancements as a new Portlet widget, MultiCombo and Range Slider form controls, naming only the smallest part of all the changes.

Portlet widget

JavaScript Portlet is a layout component that can include another component inside of it. Moreover, it’s possible to re-order portlets by drag-and-dropping them in the necessary position on your web page.

Therefore, you shouldn’t write lines of code to change the arrangement of your web page. All that you need is to grab a portlet by the handler with an inserted widget and put it at the place of future drop which is highlighted by a specific color. Want to check its performance? View this demo.